THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Dee Mosbacher, MD, PhD

“Not for a minute did I leave politics to the men in my family, as my father once asked me to do.”

Lesbian feminist psychiatrist, Academy Award nominated documentary filmmaker and social justice activist. In the early 1980s, as a medical student at Baylor College of Medicine and a resident at Harvard Medical School, co-directed two documentaries on discrimination against lesbian and gay physicians and patients. Motivated by gay bashing at the 1992 Republican National Convention, Mosbacher founded Woman Vision, a nonprofit aimed at promoting equal treatment of all people through the use of educational media. Directed and/or produced nine, multiple award-winning documentaries, including Academy Award-nominated Straight from the Heart. Other films include All God’s Children, which focuses on lesbians and gays in African-American church communities, and a 2009 film, Training Rules, which examined homophobia in women’s sports, as seen through the prism of a lawsuit against Penn State for allowing its women’s basketball coach to bully lesbian players throughout her 27-year tenure at the university. Served as San Mateo County’s Medical Director for Mental Health and Senior Psychiatrist at San Francisco’s Progress Foundation. Board member of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. 

Interviewed by Dr. Esther Rothblum, 2021